Healing Your Rift with God: A Guide to Spiritual Renewal and Ultimate Healing

HEALING YOUR RIFT WITH GOD

BEYOND WORDS PUBLISHING, INC.

10827 N.W. Cornell Road, Suite 500

Hillsboro, Oregon 97124.-9808

503-151-8700

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Copyright © 1999 by Paul Sibcy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of Beyond Words Publishing, Inc., except where permitted by law.

Editor: Hal Zina Bennett

Proofreader; Marvin Moore

Design: Laura Shaw Design

Managing editor: Kathy Matthews

Composition: William H. Brunson Typography Services

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed to the book trade by Publishers Group West

eISBN: 978-1-4516-5430-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sibcy, Paul R. (Paul Roy), 1944–

Healing your rift with God: a guide to spiritual renewal and ultimate healing / Paul R. Sibcy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 1-S8270-004-4 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-58270-004-5

1. Spiritual life, 2. Spiritual healing. I, Title.

BL624.S53314 1999

291.4’4 dc2l

98-49962

CIP

The corporate mission of Beyond Words Publishing, Inc.:

Inspire to Integrity

I salute the supreme teacher, the Truth, whose nature is bliss,

who is the giver of the highest happiness, who is pure wisdom,

who is beyond all qualities and infinite like the sky, who is

beyond words, who is one and eternal, pure and still, who is

beyond all change and phenomena and who is the silent witness

to all our thoughts and emotions—I salute Truth, the supreme teacher.

ANCIENT VEDIC HYMN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

To the Reader

Introduction: Discovering the Rift and the Inner Spring

During a retreat in the mountains, the author has a miraculous spiritual experience that helps him begin to see and heal what he calls his rift with God.

1. SEEING BEYOND SYMPTOMS TO THE SOURCE

During sessions with his students and clients, the author realizes that spiritual wounding is at the root of their symptoms.

2. A RIFT WITH SELF IS A RIFT WITH GOD

As the work develops, the author realizes that a rift with God results whenever we become out of alignment with our True Nature. The remedy to this imbalance comes in a dream.

3. THE FIVE WOUNDS YOUR DOCTOR WILL NEVER FIND

Readers learn about the five major types of spiritual wounds and how to identify their own.

4. THE FIVE STAGES TO A HEALED LIFE

The author discovers that the journey to wholeness is a hero’s journey and shows the reader how to use her inner blueprint to begin that journey.

5. GUIDELINES ON THE PATH TO SPIRITUAL RECOVERY

The reader learns that the spiritual path leads to the Inner Authority and learns guidelines for developing a path that evolves from her own heart and mind.

6. COMMON OBSTACLES TO HEALING THE RIFT

As teachers everywhere know, avoiding obstacles on the path is at least as important as learning the guidelines. In this chapter readers learn the five obstacles to spiritual recovery and how to use them to avoid the pitfalls to spiritual growth.

Epilogue: The Journey Continues

The author experiences profound life changes during the writing of this book, demonstrating that healing the rift continues throughout life, never ceasing to transform us all.

Recommended Reading

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM GRATEFUL TO GOD for this path I’ve been given and for the will and tenacity it has taken to complete this project. I give special thanks to all the clients and students who have entrusted me with their wounded souls and taught me what I needed in order to write this book. May they continue to heal and grow whole.

I feel deep and eternal gratitude to the great teachers, alive and dead, who have helped me to see myself and God and to find my way in life. Without their wisdom, love, and guidance, I could never have found a solid place to stand for living my life and doing my work. Thank God that it is written in our souls that once we find our Truth, we must share it.

I am grateful to my family, the ones who helped the seed grow into the tree it is today. To Jim Fadiman, whose Sufi teaching stirred my dormant creative fires to begin this book. To Roy Eugene Davis, for his help in finding my spiritual way. To Hal Zina Bennett, for his gentle nature and for his ability to heal the soul as he edits the manuscript. To Cindy Black, Richard Cohn, and the Beyond Words staff, for their spirituality, sensitivity, and professionalism. To Aminah Raheem, for her wonderful ability to synthesize various healing techniques into one highly transformative model.

To Jim Charlton, my co-teacher all these many years, for his loving cantankerousness. To Judi Tapfer, for her soulful editing. To Anna, for my greatest of all openings. To all the friends and associates who have believed in me and encouraged my writing. And especially to my spiritual community, which has helped me discover how deep connectedness heals the soul.

And finally, a special thanks to my friend Candace, who has always believed in my spiritual and creative nature and has encouraged me to express it in every way possible.

TO THE READER

THE PEOPLE AND EVENTS in this book are real, but in most cases specific names and details have been changed. Since the subject matter is so personal and intimate, I have chosen to disclose my own life and wounds as freely as those of my clients, students, and friends. I have found this practice of self-disclosure both frightening and healing. I offer it to my readers that we may all learn to discard our masks and tell our truth.

The spiritually wounded people I describe in this book were reared in society and were wounded by its citizens and institutions. This work, however, which is about healing and wholeness, is not intended as an indictment of those individuals or institutions. Although it is difficult to identify problems without offending those who initiated them, the intention here is to stop the wounding and begin the healing. Therefore, if the words and stories in this book have cut or wounded anyone in a non-helpful manner, I deeply regret it and apologize.

I have attempted to honor the wounds of inequality that women have long suffered with the English language by using the pronouns he and she randomly and interchangeably in this book. I also debated with myself about using the name God as the symbol word for the Great Mystery we are redefining in this epoch, since most people associate the word with maleness. The acting industry influenced me to use the word God when I realized that they currently use the word actor to describe one of their members, female or male. I use God in this book in that same spirit of equality and simplicity with the intention of healing old rifts and pain. Language is a difficult taskmaster. May we all someday learn how to write, speak, and interact without causing unnecessary pain to one another.

INTRODUCTION

Discovering the Rift and the Inner Spring

DURING THE DOG DAYS OF AUGUST on our farm in Ohio, in particularly dry years when all other sources of water for our cows had dried up, my brothers and I would be called upon to dig out the spring, which was located roughly in the center of the farm. This was not a task we relished. The temperature was invariably scorching, and none of us enjoyed this backbreaking work, swinging instruments of hard labor while wading around bare to the knees in mud and cow manure, with thousands of flies clinging first to the cows, then to the cow manure, and then to our bare skin. We went and we worked, but we held the cows personally accountable for the entire affair, because we knew it was their callous indolence that set this sad state of affairs into motion.

After all, hadn’t we just the year before dug out this same spring, wrangling out rocks and shoveling mud from the spring’s mouth so that clear waters sprang forth again, forming a cool and inviting, rock-fringed pool from which they could drink their fill? But the cows, careless and ignorant as far as we were concerned, would invariably destroy their paradise. Engrossed in their daily industry of grazing, they would trudge through instead of around the spring toward that greener grass, occasionally dropping their ample piles of manure in the midst of it. They would run through the spring while at play or in fear, wallow in it if they were hot, and generally trample everything in and around it when drinking.

To us boys, the cows were incorrigible louts, and we were sure they worked their evil on purpose to cause work and misery for us. We credited them with extreme malice when it came to these matters that caused us misery, particularly this fouling of the spring. After all, these waters were necessary for life. What creature would randomly destroy a pure, cool spring, rendering it a mud- and shit-infested hole in the ground from which no walking creature could draw nourishment? They had to know, we concluded, that we poor boys—at great cost to health and comfort—would be forced out in the scorching heat to fix it up for them.

We hated them for it. And our drama of persecution was worsened by the fact that the cows found our work very interesting. From the start, they gathered around the spring in rows—over a hundred cows—watching us intently and occasionally mooing their impatience. Hurry it up, suckers, we heard them say. We want to drink our fill and then tear it all up again for you. Such cheek. Such gall. We were humiliated and couldn’t wait to depart and leave these creatures to their vicious work.

This ancient scene is all a memory now. I had long forgotten it until, in the midst of my work, I stopped to ask for an image of what this book is all about for me. An image of the spring immediately came to mind. Of course, I realized, how perfect. We humans also have a clear, pure spring in the center of our beings, a spring of spirit that is our reason for being here. And we somehow lose it and befoul it just as those cows did, mindlessly in pursuit of our daily commerce, play, or some perceived crisis from without. Indeed, we are expected to do so. It is the way of life as we were trained to live it. Taught from infancy that we must accomplish, earn, and become somebody, we are essentially herded away from our inner spirit, which seems to have no place in life. We become somebody and lose our souls.

The same happened to me in youth, and I have learned the lesson repeatedly through the years. Little did I suspect as a boy that I would be cleaning out that spring for the rest of my life, eternally helping myself and others to roll away the stones from this pure fount of life so we might drink again the waters of our soul and be restored.

I’ve pondered for decades the problem of the blockage to our inner spring of the soul. I’ve also heard many of this century’s saints and sages talk about it. Mother Teresa, for example, commented more than once that the spiritual poverty in modern culture caused by our separation and isolation from God and one another is much worse than mere physical hunger and illness. This spiritual poverty makes beggars of us all, scrambling to find in the outer world the love and peace of mind that we were robbed of in the process of growing up. Mother Teresa was describing what I have grown to call a rift with God.

Bill, one of my students, upon returning from a visit to India, shared Mother’s feelings: I felt a great sadness in my heart, he said, when I saw homeless families in Calcutta who had lived in the streets for generations. But the sadness was not for them. It was for me. I was reared in a wealthy but loveless household, and I still feel isolated and alone. Those street people, by contrast, were loving to one another and seemed to have a deep peace that I have never experienced. They felt truly loved and connected to one another in a way I never have. In seeing them, I recognized my own inner poverty. I felt that I was the true homeless beggar, not them. And my homelessness seemed much more destructive than simply being without a house.

The great psychologist Carl Jung, author of Modern Man in Search of a Soul and many other volumes, felt the same about modern culture in general, which he believed cut people off from their instincts and intuition. This was demonstrated most poignantly for him in his discussions with the indigenous peoples of Africa and America, as recalled in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. His discussions with Ochwiay Biano, a New Mexican Pueblo Indian chief, were most enlightening:

See, Ochwiay Biano said, how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think they must be mad.

I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.

They think with their heads he replied.

Why of course, what do you think with? I asked.

We think here, he said, indicating his heart.

Jung, struck by the dignity and composure of the Hopi, concluded that it came in part from their strong spiritual beliefs and a daily ritual of communion with their mystical source:

If we set against this our own self justifications, the meaning of our own lives as it’s formulated by our reason, we cannot help but see our poverty. Out of sheer envy we are obliged to smile at the Indians’ naivete and to plume ourselves on our cleverness; for otherwise we would discover how impoverished and down at the heels we are. Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.

As I feel again the power of those words, I reflect on you and me and our modern culture. I recall my own drive to accomplish things in life, and I remember the hundreds of clients and students I have spoken with who have come to a place in their own lives where the quest for prestige and status, fancy cars, and financial security has left them empty and lonely. We were trained to seek answers to our inner poverty in the outer world, in status and external success. But it is an inner achievement we require, not an outer one. We need to heal that deep loneliness of spirit we inherit from a culture that is too clever and not enough wise. We need to heal our rifts with God.

As a poor child, I did not know I was poor until I got older and visited my wealthier friends. It’s an old story: We can’t see ourselves clearly until we get the perspective of others’ lives. Similarly, I wasn’t able to see my spiritual poverty until my early thirties, when I was thrown into a sink-or-swim breakdown of the world as I knew it. I wasn’t able to see it before that time because everyone I knew or saw had a rift as deep or deeper than my own.

When I began to recover from my own spiritual poverty, it became easily visible everywhere in our society. We are starving. We are suffering, and most of us can’t see the terrible shape we’re in because everyone around us is suffering from the same malady. Like the cows that unknowingly trampled their life-giving spring, we blindly despoil our spiritual heritage. But there is no wise farmer around to remedy the situation. Instead, our leaders in government, education, entertainment, religion, and the media, who are entrusted with the farmer’s job, are even more spiritually wounded and blind than the rest of us. No wonder Mother Teresa was aghast at our unrecognized plague.

My Own Spiritual Recovery

The first step in recovery from anything is awareness, and that awareness often comes during a journey. As we learn from mythology, the hero’s journey is about this kind of awakening, of seeing oneself in perspective. I was thirty-two when I embarked on my own mythical journey into the mountains of Utah from my adopted home in Southern California.

Frankly, it was a journey within a journey. That’s what made it feel so hopeless for me in the beginning. I had thought that leaving my childhood home in Ohio for California only thirty months before was the journey of my life. It had changed me so profoundly that I knew I could never go home again. Yet here I was on the road once more, trying to find I knew not what by leaving my adopted home in Los Angeles. I have heard it said that creatures in pain keep moving from one locale to another in a subconscious maneuver to escape that pain. The Twelve Step groups call it doing a geographical. I was discovering a real talent for it.

I was a creature in pain who kept moving. I left the Los Angeles area in much pain and confusion, hoping to find my way in life, the reason I had moved to L.A. two and one-half years earlier. Two long-term dreams had failed during my stay there, and I felt the weight of those failures. First, my seven-year marriage, long on the rocks, had finally turned belly-up and refused to revive. It was a merciful death for both of us, I knew, but something that wasn’t supposed to happen to Ohio farm boys. And second, I had finally been forced to admit I was not cut out to be a college writing and literature teacher or a publications writer. From the time I left factory work and started college on the GI Bill at age twenty-five, I had loved writing poetry, which offered as much hope of providing a living as a special talent at tiddlywinks. So my farmer’s practicality told me that if I got a college teaching credential, I could write while I taught. Somehow, I had never considered that something as noble-sounding as college teaching could feel as meaningless to me as working in a factory had felt years earlier. Not all change gives us what we want.

It was not as if I had chosen my career blindly. Like most people, I chose carefully from among all options, following my practical reasoning, which was all I knew at the time. I loved literature, just as I loved my wife. I chose both because I had been looking for something—an answer to my pain, I suppose. I know now that I had always carried a great deal of pain. I had gone from the farm to the army during the Vietnam War years, and later I worked in an appliance factory. I was always looking for that elusive sense of happiness, and nothing seemed to